How and when Dad made his arrangements with Poppy, I never knew. The only time I remember him and Poppy ever meeting was when we ran into her in the supermarket, a few days after Sara’s disappearance became public knowledge.
She came up to us at the checkout and, in heavy tones, she had said that if ever there was anything she could do for us, we had only to ask. She’d never shown the slightest interest in us before. ‘Now call me,’ she said.
Now we had this gimcrack arrangement whereby I would stay with Poppy and Michel until the end of the school year. Picture Michel and me, studying for our exams, elbow to elbow in those cupboard-sized rooms, deep in the heart of that housing estate I could not stand. What Poppy made of this arrangement – why she ever suggested it – is a mystery I have never been able to fathom.
Poppy’s front garden was even more doll-like than its neighbours. Nothing had been permitted to grow above waist height. It was the garden of someone grown suspicious of life’s potential. The back garden was more or less a mirror image of the front: dwarf conifers and heathers, and an anaemic-yellow lawn so close-mown, so fine-bladed, you could see the earth beneath.
The back door was open. The kitchen smelled of detergent. Poppy sat reading a library book – a collection of humorous newspaper columns. She saved her place with a tasselled plastic bookmark and stood to greet me. ‘I’ll show you the house.’ She couldn’t have freighted the process with more dignity if she’d been leading me around a stately home.
‘This is the master bedroom.’
What was I supposed to say?
‘This is the living room.’
When Poppy spoke, it was always at the shrill end of her register, as though she was pleading in her own defence.
‘This is the kitchen. And this is where you came in.’ Did she imagine the tour had disorientated me?
We ate in the kitchen, squatting on chrome stools upholstered in black vinyl. The stools were old. Their leather-look texture had worn off and they were as slippy to sit on as if they had been oiled. The table was worse – a chipboard thing, laminated in frictionless wood-effect plastic. It was the kind of table you get in caravans. It was attached to the wall. You let it down by pulling a handle.
Poppy laid out matching cutlery. Glasses. Cups. Cake knives. There was barely any room for food. ‘I’ve made you a cream tea.’ There was a freezer-cabinet cream cake. Dry, feathery home-made scones with cream. A fruit salad with cream in a jug. Everything in tiny portions.
Poppy had laid out plastic laminated place-mats for us, and our plates moved about on them while we were eating. Watching me, Poppy’s anxiety reached fever pitch – she was afraid I might place too much weight on the table’s mechanism. ‘Please don’t lean on the table. Don’t put anything heavy on the table. It’s a let-down!’
I was more concerned with trying to keep my arse on the stool. I kept slipping off, trying to reach things as they spun away from me across the table’s ice-smooth surface. Afterwards I buzzed from all the sugar I had eaten, and the back of my mouth felt fluey, clotted with uncooked flour.
‘We should have eaten outside! In the garden! It’s such a nice evening. We could have eaten outside!’
She insisted on washing up. ‘I know where everything goes.’ Michel and I went into his bedroom and he dug out a cassette tape for us to listen to. We sat on his bed. It was incredibly narrow. ‘It’s a two-foot six.’ Poppy came in to put clothes away.
She gave Michel no privacy at all. How could there have been much privacy, in a space as cramped as this? Michel’s room was as long and narrow as the living space on board a yacht. There was a fluorescent tube in the ceiling, and its grey, pitiless light brought the walls in even further. It felt, sitting in that room, like being squashed into a Tupperware box.
I remember there was this weird, wood-effect plastic panel that went around the wall. ‘It’s to stop the bed from marking the wall,’ Michel explained.
‘What’s the problem with the bed marking the wall?’
‘Mum doesn’t want it to.’
‘The bed’s in the way. She’s never going to know whether it’s marking the wall or not.’
Michel’s bed ran lengthways along the left-hand wall. His desk, narrow as a shelf and veneered in wood-effect plastic, ran lengthways along the right-hand wall. There was a cupboard to the right of the door, which, instead of opening normally, slid along metal runners ‘to save space’. Michel’s bedroom door, the let-down table in the kitchen, the shelf-like desk and the sofa in the living room, its seat so narrow it might have been built for children, were all parts of Poppy’s on-going programme to single-handedly ‘save space’. (Poppy’s talk was modular, a collection of preprocessed jargon phrases strung together. After a few days of this, everything she said began to acquire a meaning beyond itself, like a word repeated so often it turns strange in the mouth.)
Poppy burst into Michel’s room whenever she felt like it. Or she tried to. If you leant against Michel’s wardrobe, it slipped on the thin nylon carpet (sick-green cobwebs on a ground of darker green) and blocked the door. The bang the door made when it hit the edge of the wardrobe was startlingly loud.
‘Oh! Mind the paintwork! Come and move the wardrobe!’
When the wardrobe was in the way the door could only open a couple of inches. Poppy did her best to peer through the gap. Her eye hung in the darkness of the hall, disembodied. An eye without a face. ‘Are you all right in there, you two?’
At night I slept in Michel’s room, on a camp bed that had once been his dad’s. It was made of canvas, stretched over a tubular steel frame. It was comfortable, but if I needed the toilet in the middle of the night, there was no room for me to just roll out of the bed. (I tried it once and cracked my head on the edge of the desk and ended up stuck under the desk, tangled up in the legs of Michel’s bright orange tubular steel chair.) Instead I had to shimmy down to the foot of the bed until it tipped up on end.
The sliding door rattled when I opened it.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘What’s going on out there?’
‘I’m going to the toilet, Poppy. I’m fine.’
The lavatory and the bathroom were separate rooms. The lavatory door had a lock and a key, and Poppy kept the key on the outside of the door. Not on the inside, so you could guarantee your privacy, but on the outside, so she could leave the lavatory window open when she went out and still secure the house. Anyway, this is what she said. It’s just as likely she locked Michel in the lavatory as a punishment, or used to, before I turned up. Certainly that’s what it looked like.
The toilet pan sat under a small, high window. Sitting on the pan, I was just a couple of inches short of being able to lean my head on the door.
‘Is everything all right?’
Back in the bedroom, Michel was awake, sitting up in bed, waiting for me. I leant against his wardrobe, slipping it into the path of the door.
We waited, listening for movement. He pulled the sheets away. It took my eyes, still dazzled from the lavatory light, some minutes to adapt. Michel was already hard. His hand was on his prick, moving a little, as he watched me standing there, framed against the white gloss of his little wardrobe, a child’s wardrobe – you could still make out the silhouette of the plastic bunnies that once decorated its doors. He watched me slip off my T, watched me slip off my pants. I was just as hard as he was. Starlight sheened his thighs, his arms, his prick. Light glistened round the dark bulb of his prick, I wanted to touch it. More. I dared, that night, what I had not dared before. Fingers to my mouth, the salt there, good. I bent my head and felt his hands in my hair, bringing me down, his prick, so beautiful, rigid in the little light – ribbed and veined and very salt.
A bang.
A disembodied eye.
‘Is everything all right?’
R
alf, too, has taken to wearing AR-enabled contact lenses. There is something cold, something faintly repulsive about them. They are supposed to make Augmented Reality more appealing. And they do, in a twisted, self-fulfilling way, by making ordinary human communication just a touch less pleasant. It’s hard to read a person’s face when you can’t read the pupils of their eyes.
Eventually it occurs to him to ask, ‘So what are you doing, Conrad?’
I have signed an agreement locking me out of Augmented Reality for eighteen months following Loophole’s sale. Perhaps I will go back to it. Perhaps not. The whole business has begun to unnerve me. It’s not the same now that the old dev crowd has dispersed.
I took Ralf to task over Bryon Vaux’s party trick. It didn’t even occur to him to apologise. Vaux had given him the impression that the trick was by way of professional joshing. I couldn’t make Ralf understand that Cobb – whoever he was, private detective or actor or pure avatar – had frightened me.
Ralf said to me – he actually said this – ‘You have to bear in mind the difference the new superconductors have made to how we deploy inductive video.’
What he meant was: there is technology out there now that can hijack the optic nerve. No glasses necessary. No lenses. A strong enough magnetic field, well-shaped, bends a mind to the desired shape. The equipment they’d used to have Cobb ‘visit’ me that night – I never found it. Either the devices were too small to spot, or more likely their energies had been directed at me from a distance. A van parked in the street. The house opposite. If you can do that, you can warp any part of the real. Reality has been aerosolised, the senses weaponised against us. Every sensation is Muzak now.
‘Who was Cobb?’
‘Who was who?’ Ralf didn’t know or care what kind of stunt Vaux had pulled on me. And by then I was fed up. Ralf wasn’t curious, and I wasn’t in the mood to try to shake his complacency. Moral issues never trouble Ralf’s type much – for them, all questions have a technical solution.
Now Ralf is back in the lab where he feels most comfortable: a backroom boy. Beneath the puffery he has acquired – Bryon Vaux’s Chief Imagineer – he’s still his old self.
He showed me round. Right now he’s working on a full prosthesis platform: a thin exoskeleton that will do you the favour of punching you in the stomach when a villainous avatar takes a swing at you. That will trip you over if you miss that virtual step. That will shake your hand. Kiss you. Slap your back for a level well completed. God knows what.
The metro takes me home. I’m back in the old locomotive factory again – third time lucky, I suppose. I walk past a line of parked cars, studiously ignoring the horn blasts – it’s best to keep yourself to yourself on these streets – but the voice is unmistakably Agnes’s. ‘Connie! Over here!’
Hanna climbs from the driver’s seat. She looks exhausted. She shuts her door and leans against it as I approach. Agnes is still strapped into her seat in the back. She waves out her window frantically – a little kidnap victim. ‘Conrad! We were waiting for you!’
‘How long have you been out here?’
‘Not long.’
‘We’ve been
ages
,’ Agnes cries. ‘Ages and
ages
!’
‘Hello, Han.’
‘Hello, Connie.’ She seizes my fingers and squeezes them, reminding me of the lack of human contact in my life.
‘Hanna. You should have phoned.’
‘I lost your number.’
‘Mick has my number. What?’
Hanna rubs at her temples. ‘Can we come in?’
I lead them up to my new apartment on the second storey. It’s not ideal here. It’s noisy, for a start, though warmer than the rooftop rooms I’ve had before. ‘There’s not a lot in here.’
‘We’ve eaten, thanks.’
‘I had a kebab! It was disgusting!’
Hanna wants to talk – which is a novelty in itself – but Agnes gets first dibs on my attention. She has lengthened out. She has acquired a whole new set of mannerisms to lay on top of the first set. She is going to be a monster when she’s older. Suddenly the mannerisms fall away and she might be years younger as she asks, ‘Can I play on your keyboard?’
‘Use the headphones.’
‘Okay! Where is it?’
‘The other room. There’s only one other room. If it’s not the toilet, then you’re in the right room.’
Agnes goes off giggling.
‘So?’
Hanna visibly summons up strength and says, ‘Michel and I are separating.’
There is nothing I can say to this. I start preparing coffee.
‘We’ve been in a bad place for a long while,’ she says.
Strange, the way geography creeps in to these announcements. ‘We were in a bad place.’ ‘I needed my space.’ Strange and tiresome. ‘What did he do?’
Hanna ignores my attempt to cut through to the blame. ‘Michel’s very upset about things.’
‘I tried telling you that last Christmas.’
Hanna looks at me as though I were speaking a foreign language.
‘Remember?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t. Anyway. I don’t know whether he told you, but his mum died last week.’
Just dropped in there – another unfortunate event.
‘Poppy
died
?’
‘He went to sort out the funeral.’
‘When is it?’
‘It was yesterday.’
‘Oh.’ The pot starts to hiss and bubble. I lift it off the plate. ‘Thanks for telling me.’
‘I’m sorry, Connie. It wasn’t up to me. I didn’t go either. I was looking after Agnes.’
‘Agnes didn’t go?’
Hanna shakes her head. ‘Mick didn’t think it was such a good idea.’
‘Right. How do you take this?’
‘Milk.’
I faff around for a while. ‘I would have liked to have been there.’
‘Yes?’
‘I would have gone.’ I never liked Poppy very much but there was something admirable about her. While Dad was tearing himself free and unable to cope with me, she had given me a home. I would have liked to pay my respects.
‘Anyway.’ Hanna takes a seat at the table. ‘He’s stayed on in Sand Lane to sort out her things.’
‘Right. Jesus, Hanna.’
‘I know. It all comes at once, doesn’t it?’
I go and glance round the door. Agnes is on the piano stool, earphones cupped round her head like muffs, bopping away to the piano’s demo track.